joshbrown's profile picture

joshbrown 's review for:

Essex County by Jeff Lemire
5.0

Nostalgia, regret, loneliness, love, heartache. Inherent emotions that Lemire can convey with what seems at first like a simple sketch. Using just black, white, and a lot of vast open space, Essex County still feels rich and lived in, and the characters who inhabit it even more so. Throughout these stories, a family tree is explored and the cuts between past and present that we are given are sharp; sometimes painful or lovely or both. The same panel displayed three times in a row often brings you into a character's headspace more than a thought bubble could.

Simple art and a simple story could be taken as an insult. In this case, that couldn't be further from the truth.